A Day at the Races

Instead of waiting for you to offer me a penny for my thoughts I'm going to give you my two cents worth about the elections.

A. Politics in general in Israel

The legendary Senator Huey P. Long of the great state of Louisiana is reputed to have said: "When I die (if I die) I wish to be buried in Louisiana – so I can stay active in politics". There are rumors that Chicagoans in the hey-day of the machine were just as active in politics. Long was assassinated and buried in his home state – but I doubt if he stayed active in politics, after all there is a time to retire.

I don't think we're as political as that in Israel, but…

In Israel we have much wisdom. So we have many wise people – but also many "wise guys". We have many wise political opinions, so we have many political parties. The wise give sway to their political opinions not only in elections – but also in the media, the courts and in the prosecutors' offices. Still – we have elections that are free, something rare in our corner of the world.

B. The Media

For democracy to work well the people need to be educated and informed of current events so they can make an educated choice at election time. That's why universal education is important in a democracy. Of course for Jews education in order to be a good person has always been very important. The way the people are meant to be informed is through the media. However I believe it was Churchill that said that if you don't read the newspapers you are uninformed, and if you do read the papers you are misinformed. Israeli media is very much one-sided, especially the public media, and therefore it is very active in the misinformation business, so the people don't really know much about either the facts or the real positions of the different parties. That works to the detriment of democracy – and it's a shame that is the situation.

C. The Polls

The polls were so wrong as to cause some people to believe they were slanted to begin with, in the worst scenario, or were unprofessional in the best scenario. In either case – I wonder if anyone is going to take responsibility for the huge mistake and resign. Probably not – so the same poll-takers will continue taking inaccurate polls and reporters will continue to use the misinformation of inexact polls – if they serve their biased agenda.

D. Race

The Prime Minister called on people who prefer a right-wing government to go out and vote in order to offset the supposed surge in Arab voters going to the polls.

Is this racist?

Well – it's well known in Newspeak Grammar that you can be racist only in certain directions. So if there is a united Arab party, joining secular Communists, Arab nationalists and Islamic activists – that in everyday life don't "party" together – and the only unifying factor is race: is that a race-based party and therefore racist, even if there is a token Jew? To me the bigger question is: assuming the answer is yes – so what? Anyway – Arabs, or blacks, are allowed to be racist, because Newspeak teaches that only Whites (in Newspeak Jews are always white) can be racist. That's why over 90% of blacks voting for Obama isn't racist (=bad) - and Arabs are always black in Newspeak.Of course - this is more racist than racist because it judges people by the color of their skin and not by their content!

The rumors were that Obama and Friends were working to get out the Arab vote in the effort to get Netanyahu out of office. If the rumors were true – then the Prime Minister's call may be impolite and crass – but possibly also on target.

E. Left and Right

In Israel there are two leftist parties, the Zionist Camp and Meretz, that received 29 seats in the new Knesset. There are two right-wing parties, the Likud and Bayit Yehudi that received 38 seats. There are ultra-Orthodox parties, with voters closer to the right than the left, that received 13 seats. Then there are two parties that portray themselves as centrist and deal more with civil life and the economy that received 21 seats. These parties attract people who say to themselves: well the left-right divide about the peace process is irrelevant, since the Arabs don't want peace with us, so we're going to ignore that issue and vote on other issues. That means that all in all about two thirds of the electorate agrees with Netanyahu's statement that for practical purposes there can be no Arab state between the sea and the river.

There's more to be said, but those are some basics to work with.

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